Police investigators in Lincoln, Neb., have not ruled out the possibility that a 33-year-old lesbian allegedly attacked last weekend because of her sexual orientation might have staged the hate crime. But they’re also not ready to call her story, which has ignited interest across the country, a complete fabrication.

Chief Jim Peschong told the Lincoln Journal Star that investigators, aided by the FBI, continue to search for suspects in the case but remain uncertain whether the attack even took place. ( continue to full post… )

Editor’s Note: Police subsequently said they had not ruled out the possibility that the attack was staged.

Last weekend, three men in masks stormed into a woman’s home in Nebraska, bound her wrists and ankles with zip ties, and carved anti-gay slurs into the woman’s body. The men also painted anti-gay slurs on the walls and poured gasoline on the floor to light the house on fire before fleeing, police said.

The fires went out, but firemen and paramedics rushing to the scene in Lincoln, last Sunday discovered the woman, who was a lesbian, across the street, bloody and dazed.

“She had blood streaming down her body,” Raymond Strozier, a neighbor, told the Lincoln Journal Star. “She was crying. She was shaking. She was terrified.” ( continue to full post… )

Three white supremacists involved in a racially motivated assault last year on a black man in Houston will serve federal prison sentences ranging from 30 to 77 months.

Brian Kerstetter, 32, was sentenced yesterday to 77 months, followed by three years of supervised release, by U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt. Charles Cannon, 26, was sentenced to 37 months and Michael McLaughlin, 41, to 30 months. They each also must complete three years of supervision upon their release. ( continue to full post… )

The FBI in 2010 disrupted what its agents now believe was a terrorist plot that involved killing President Obama, according to testimony and court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Spokane, Wash.

The revelation came at the two-day sentencing hearing for white supremacist Wayde Lynn Kurt, the accused mastermind of an alleged plot that was foiled with his arrest on federal firearms and forgery charges.

At the time of his arrest on Aug. 30, 2010, Kurt was associated with a gang of violent neo-Nazi skinheads and white supremacist Odinists who proudly talked of carrying out “coon-hunting” racial attacks in the Pacific Northwest. Their conversations were captured on a videotape that was later turned over to the FBI and shown in court during Kurt’s sentencing hearing. ( continue to full post… )

A would-be Aryan warrior who apparently thought he’d committed the perfect murder forgot one thing: There’s no mud in North Dakota in the middle of the winter.

It was a pair of muddy boots and coveralls, along with a mud stain on a basement wall, that led investigators to discover the buried, decapitated head of a missing state university researcher in January 2011 in Cooperstown, N.D., Griggs County Sheriff Robert S. Hook told Hatewatch today.

Daniel Evan Wacht, a 31-year-racist from California with a lengthy criminal record, was convicted Tuesday in Griggs County District Court of felony murder in the death of Kurt Johnson, 54, of Cooperstown. ( continue to full post… )

The FBI has recovered a disposable camera that reportedly was used to photograph Amish men and women whose beards and hair were forcibly shaved in what is now being prosecuted as a federal hate crime.

That detail is contained in a new, expanded 10-count federal indictment just returned by a grand jury in Cleveland. The indictment increases the number of defendants from seven to 16.

The victims and the defendants in the case are Amish – traditionally pacifists who usually resolve their disputes internally without law enforcement. The beards and hair of the victims were sheared, federal court documents allege, to disgrace the victims as punishment for “previous and ongoing religious disagreements” with members of the Amish faith in Ohio. ( continue to full post… )

The weekend death in California of a 32-year-old Iraqi immigrant – a mother of five children — is drawing worldwide attention as the latest possible U.S. hate crime killing.

Shaima Alawadi died Saturday after she was taken off life support, three days after being found unconscious and brutally beaten in her family home in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego, authorities said.

The victim’s 17-year-old daughter, Fatima Al Himidi, told San Diego’s KUSI-TV that her mother was beaten on the head with a tire iron and a threatening note was found nearby saying, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” ( continue to full post… )

In the first case of its kind, the FBI on Wednesday arrested the leader of an Amish splinter sect and six of his followers in Ohio on federal hate crime charges for cutting the hair and beards of other Amish men and women.

The hair-cutting was a form of religious degradation and viewed as punishment in a leadership squabble among various Amish clans, court documents say. ( continue to full post… )

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50% last year, skyrocketing over 2009 levels in a year marked by the vicious rhetoric of Islam-bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York City.

Although the national statistics compiled by the FBI each year are known to dramatically understate the real level of reported and unreported hate crimes, they do offer telling indications of some trends. The latest statistics, showing a jump from 107 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2009 to 160 in 2010, seem to reflect a clear rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric from groups like Stop Islamization of America. Much of that rhetoric was aimed at stopping an Islamic center in lower Manhattan.

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Two psychologists testified this week that a Santa Maria, Calif., parolee charged with trying to murder a local waiter a year ago is mentally incompetent to stand trial. Curtis Martin allegedly asked a waiter at a Denny’s Restaurant if he was gay and when the victim answered that he was, Martin stabbed him twice.

Anthony Weston, one of three men charged with hate crimes in the beating of two Mexican citizens, has pleaded guilty and is expected to receive probation in exchange for his testimony against the other two defendants. Prosecutors say the three men attacked their victims outside a bar in San Francisco last November while yelling “white power.”

Ricky L. Hawkins was indicted on aggravated assault and civil rights intimidation charges for allegedly hitting a black man with a baseball bat in Lake City, Tenn., in 2010. Authorities said Hawkins, who is white, was shouting racial epithets at his victim when he was arrested and later told them that he was angry because the victim had dated a woman Hawkins was going out with. Hawkins reportedly had tattoos associated with the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations group.